#278: Of untethered anxiety and moody poetry
Hi there,
I know I’ve been MIA for the past two weeks. The news from Rafah, our own country’s politics and last night’s cyclone has me feeling a little out of sorts as I write this. It’s been an anxious month, so I’ll keep this one short.
Poetry Corner
Opera Singer by Ross Gay
Today my heart is so goddamned fat with grief
that I’ve begun hauling it in a wheelbarrow. No. It’s an anvil
dragging from my neck as I swim
through choppy waters swollen with the putrid corpses of hippos,
which means lurking, somewhere below, is the hungry
snout of a croc waiting to spin me into an oblivion
worse than this run-on simile, which means only to say:
I’m sad. And everyone knows what that means.The Way It Is by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.The Secret by Jeffrey McDaniel (Love the imagery in this one!)
When you were sleeping on the sofa
I put my ear to your ear and listened
to the echo of your dreams.
That is the ocean I want to dive in,
merge with the bright fish,
plankton and pirate ships.
I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you
and ask them the questions I would ask you.
Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke
rising from a chimney?
Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?
I don’t wish I was in your arms,
I just wish I was peddling a bicycle
toward your arms.Work, Sometimes by Mary Oliver
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.The Need Is So Great by Jim Moore
Sometimes I just sit like this at the window and watch
the darkness come. If I’m smart, I’ll put on Bach.
I’m thinking now of how far it always seems there is to go.
Maybe it is too easy that I speak so often
of late last light on a December day,
of that stubborn grass that somehow still remains green
behind the broken chain link fence on the corner.
But the need is so great for the way light looks
as it takes its leave of us. We say
what we can to each other of these things,
we who are such thieves, stealing first
one breath and then the next. Bach, keep going
just this slowly, show me the way to believe
that what matters in this world has already happened
and will go on happening forever.
The way light falls on the last
of the stricken leaves of the copper beech
at the end of the block is something to behold.
Watch
The Boy and the Heron, a painfully beautifully Miyazaki film (possibly his last?) about a young boy struggling to settle in a new town after his mother’s death. Personally, it felt like the darkest Studio Ghibli work yet but it’s just so powerful in the storytelling and world building. Still can’t believe I got to see it on a big screen.
Big Mood, an excellent portrayal of bipolar disorder and female friendship. Nicola Coughlan did such an amazing job in this. (Trigger Warning)
Chamkila, a biopic on the late Punjabi singer Amar Singh Chamkila. The aspects of censorship, caste and how the personal is political are addressed so well in this Imtiaz Ali film. A must watch.
A parting thought
“A notebook, probably, or a to-do list of everything we do not yet know but might actually want, also abt flowers, travels, books / not-books, poems / not-poems, communist desire, brand mis-management, perfume and the other senses, ideas about love and also ideas about the shape of ideas, what does it mean to be tethered to the world in an ending world and what brings about unending or untetherment.”
-Anne Boyer
No links or music today, but thank you for being here.
Stay safe and don’t let the fascists win. Please.
Love and mercy,
Rohini
Don't let the anxiety win.